For producer Murphy, 'no' is not an answer
By Anne Thompson
"I'm not really mad at anybody at the moment," Don Murphy says over a burger at his lunch hangout, Ammo. That's his rep, of course: angry young producer who launched his career with a bang by producing Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone's controversial 1994 movie "Natural Born Killers," which Murphy's then-partner Jane Hamsher chronicled in her tell-all book, "Killer Instinct."
More than a decade later, Long Island native and USC grad Murphy, 41, has matured into a prolific Hollywood producer with two studio action pictures prepping production starts this year. First up in mid-February is New Line Cinema's "Shoot 'Em Up," starring Clive Owen as a man who delivers a woman's baby during a holdup. Scheduled for a May shoot is Michael Bay's huge-scale "Transformers," a DreamWorks/Paramount co-production executive produced by Steven Spielberg, based on the Hasbro line of shape-shifting robots. And down the pike at Paramount is the recently announced David Fincher thriller "Torso," based on the '90s graphic novel about a real-life Cleveland serial killer chased by famous gangster-basher Eliot Ness.
On "Transformers," Murphy chased down the rights from Hasbro with "X-Men" producer Tom DeSanto. "I knew at Comic-Con three years ago that the '80s were back. Kids were responding to GI Joe and Transformers. We pitched every studio, and they all passed. Finally DreamWorks execs gave it to Steven, and they worked out a Paramount co-production." Murphy wasted no time: At Comic-Con International in July, a giant Transformers truck dominated the huge convention floor.
Over the years, Murphy always hears the same rap on him: " 'You have the best taste in town, you actually get movies made, but you can be hard to handle,' " he says. "It's an assessment I can live with, especially since I'm not sure which good producer in Hollywood is easy to handle. Talent goes a long way, but tenacity is the only way a film gets made."
Fortunately, that's something Murphy has in abundance. But he has mellowed enough to channel his outsize passions into his movies. (He's even married.) Refreshingly, in this polished town of polite yes-you-to-death-men, Murphy is the same scruffy, heart-on-his-sleeve guy as ever. It's still not a good idea to piss him off -- after all, his 6-year-old production company is called Angry Films. He'll happily post a response to the entire World Wide Web at DonMurphy.net -- or call his lawyer. (Check out his scathing rebuttal to Peter Biskind's indie history "Down and Dirty Pictures," which includes Murphy's infamous fistfight with Tarantino.)
While he's no Jerry Bruckheimer, Murphy is successful because from Tarantino on, he has chased after the material that excited him -- which often happens to be the comic book action fare that makes studio execs see dollar signs. From the start, Murphy realized that "the established properties with valuable names were already tapped," he says. "DC and Marvel have 100 properties each with good stories, but you wouldn't know what they were. If something is a good idea, it doesn't matter where it comes from."
He was among the first people to discover Alan Moore's graphic novels, for example, including "From Hell," which became the 2001 Hughes brothers movie starring Johnny Depp, and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," which starred a sprawling ensemble led by Sean Connery. Murphy brought his favorite Stephen King book, "Apt Pupil," to his old USC pal Bryan Singer, who directed the story about a Nazi war criminal as his follow-up to "The Usual Suspects." "Bryan's one of the good guys," he says.
When the Walt Disney of Japan, Hayao Miyazaki, told Murphy he wouldn't grant him remake rights to his animated classic "Kiki's Delivery Service," Murphy looked at the flyleaf of the book it was based on and realized that Miyazaki didn't control the underlying rights. So Murphy optioned the material from "a little old lady in Tokyo" with producer Mark Gordon, and instead of starting to package the project, he sent the DVD straight to Disney production chief Nina Jacobson. "Let's do it," she told Murphy after her kids kept watching the movie over and over. Jeff Stockwell ("The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys") is writing. "Never take no for an answer," Murphy says.
Now he's working with comic book writers like Neil Gaiman ("MirrorMask"), whose short story "Murder Mysteries" is being adapted by screenwriter David Goyer ("Blade," "Batman Begins") for Goyer to direct. "Torso" came about because Murphy knew that comic artist Todd McFarlane had been sitting on the rights to the graphic novel for years. "After Eliot Ness has cleaned up Chicago, he's in Cleveland during the '30s Depression as public safety officer dealing with the Torso Killer, possibly America's first serial killer," says Murphy, who took the project to ex-Fox chairman Bill Mechanic, who first brought in "Barbershop's" George Tillman, and then "Fight Club" director Fincher.
Not easily impressed, Murphy admits that he got a kick out of meeting Spielberg three times in one month in the DreamWorks conference room. "My mouth was agape," he says. "On 'Transformers,' he knew the mythology of all the cartoon shows and comics better than I did." Murphy also is developing a project with executive producers Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis for Jonathan Mostow ("Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines") to direct: "Real Steel," based on the short story by Richard Matheson ("The Twilight Zone") about robot boxers. And he's hoping the new DreamWorks/Paramount will bring H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" to life with Guillermo del Toro ("Hellboy") at the helm -- and a $70 million budget. "Steven Xeroxed Guillermo's notebook full of drawings," he says. "Guillermo's done some amazing spectral motion maquettes."
On his own now after 61⁄2 years at Sony Pictures Entertainment, the producer still harbors hopes of rescuing the famed Japanese cartoon "Astro Boy" from Sony development hell. "Back in 1997, I showed Amy Pascal one of the original black-and-white episodes from the 1950s, and she cried," he says. " 'Astro Boy' is the Mickey Mouse of Japan. We've never gotten the project right. We started doing it as live action, but 'A.I.' was another robot Pinocchio. Then we were doing a CG version, but 'Robots' came out. Now we're doing it live action again with an animation director. We'll never get it back. No one wants to go to Japan and say we lost Mickey Mouse."
Murphy has also produced edgy character pieces, such as Jerry Stahl's addiction memoir "Permanent Midnight," starring Ben Stiller, and Larry Clark's critically hailed teen drama "Bully." "Shoot 'Em Up" came over the transom from Murphy's old USC colleague, writer-director Michael Davis. "At USC, Davis and Jay Roach were the ones everyone thought would have stunning directing careers," says Murphy, who was so impressed with the script that he wanted to let Davis direct it. But who would hire a guy known for making direct-to-video romantic comedies? Davis supplied animated action sequences from the movie "to help sell it," Murphy says. "But it was still hard."
Young New Line Cinema executive Jeff Katz, "whose spirit hasn't been broken yet," Murphy says, liked the project, but another exec blocked it because New Line production chief Toby Emmerich had just had a baby. "I got angry," Murphy says. "You're not allowed to pass on this movie for that reason. I told Katz to take it to another executive." Katz took it to New Line chairman Bob Shaye, who gave it the green light. Then one actor after another said yes: Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, Monica Belluci. "It was like butter, molasses," Murphy says.
On the other hand, New Line's "A Cool Breeze on the Underground" is one of those movies that can't seem to move forward, no matter what Murphy does. Written and directed by "Butterfly Effect" filmmakers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, the movie has seen actors including Nick Stahl, Evan Rachel Wood and Hayden Christensen come and go. On the horizon: Bruce Willis and Justin Timberlake. "At the end of the day," Murphy says, "getting any film made is a stone cold miracle."
